Following years at war, restless at peace

Once soldiers go home, they need to readjust to life without combat

By Thom Shanker, New York Times

Published 8:14 pm, Saturday, January 18, 2014

Fort Drum

Spc. Perez Brown Jr. spent three years in the Army and two tours in Afghanistan, where on his 23rd birthday a homemade bomb blew up a vehicle in his convoy and he came close to driving over another one just down the road. "That second one might have been for me," he said.

Now Brown is safely home with the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, where he goes on field marches in the frosty forests near Lake Ontario. He will not be sent again to Afghanistan, where U.S. involvement is winding down, so he is part of an Army that is no longer carrying out war plans, only training for them.

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Although he is glad to be back, Brown misses the intensity and purpose that deployments brought to his life. Here in upstate New York, he said, it is peaceful but a little boring. "There are too many slow days," he said.

A dozen years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, most of the 2 million American men and women who went to war are home, adjusting to new lives. Slightly more than half remain in the armed services, where many are struggling to find relevance in the face of an uncertain future.

Their restlessness is a particular challenge for the Army, which must sustain the morale of soldiers who have returned to U.S. bases and are living what the military calls garrison life.

"You have to ask yourself if you want to be that leader who is relegated to navigating garrison bureaucracy: submitting ammo requests, coordinating weapons ranges and conducting inventories," said Capt. Brandon Archuleta, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who returned to Hunter Army Airfield, Ga. "I know those processes are in place for a reason, but it's frustrating nonetheless."

Lt. Andrew Mayville, who commanded an artillery platoon of 20 soldiers in Afghanistan and is back home at Fort Drum, misses the urgency of his deployment, so he is applying to the Special Forces, a branch of the Army that trains allied militaries overseas and is sent to hot spots. "You can compare it to a football player who trains for years," he said, "and doesn't want to sit on the bench for the Super Bowl."

The problems soldiers face in adjusting to ordinary Army life after combat weighs on commanders. "It takes a bit of audacity to fall out of a perfectly good airplane in the dark of night," said the 82d Airborne Division's command sergeant major, LaMarquis Knowles, based at Fort Bragg, N.C. "So there are some challenges when we integrate back into civilization. You transition from one mind-set — you roll out of your cot and you seek and destroy the enemy to coming back to the States, where we want you to drive safely."

Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, acknowledged that the Army and its soldiers were at "a very important inflection point." The numbers tell part of the story: The Army is reducing to 490,000 troops from a post-9/11 peak of 570,000, and some at the Pentagon are suggesting that budget cuts might force the Army down to as low as 420,000 in years to come.

But Odierno insisted that the Army would not be confined to garrison life. Instead, he said, his soldiers will be "globally responsive and regionally engaged" in overseas war games, exercises with foreign militaries and, if needed, deployments to hot spots.

He also wants to restore a schedule of academic training, which was pushed aside by combat.